Only about one in 10 people in Vancouver is younger than 12, and a recent City of Vancouver survey found that 58 per cent of families are considering leaving the city in the next three years.

Anecdotal evidence and declines in school enrolment suggest that while the overall population of Vancouver has grown, many families with kids have already left. For the past two school years, enrolment has grown in B.C., but shrunk in Vancouver while Surrey and Langley have gained the most students. The trend is troubling because a city bereft of children will suffer both economic and social consequences, including increased isolation, experts say.

Families are key to a city’s stability and social fabric because they are the ones who tend to stay in neighbourhoods for a long time, says Charles Montgomery, Vancouver urbanist and author of the book Happy City, who also advises cities about how to turn themselves into happier places.

“Here in Vancouver, our affordability crisis and our sociability crisis are intimately connected. We need to solve them both at the same time,” said Montgomery.

Sarah Kift and her family are among those who felt compelled to move out of Vancouver. The family’s two-bedroom basement suite wasn’t set up for life with a child. And with houses in their neighbourhood off Commercial Drive selling for more than $1.2 million, they feared any house they rented could be sold.

“We knew we wanted somewhere secure,” Kift said.

Earlier this year, the family was approved for a co-op housing townhouse in New Westminster. She didn’t even bother applying for a co-op in Vancouver, where there are long waitlists.

Their previous basement suite was $1,100 a month, but the new townhouse is $940. It is five minutes from SkyTrain and close to amenities, Kift said.

Now, she is a stay-at-home mom while her husband’s commute to his job as a librarian at the Vancouver Public Library is shorter than it was from East Vancouver.

Kift was surprised to discover she doesn’t miss living in the city.

“I’ve always cared very deeply about Vancouver. I was kind of shocked about how great it was to not live there anymore,” said Kift.

Madeleine Sauve and her family are also thinking about leaving Vancouver after a heart-wrenching move out of the Mount Pleasant neighbourhood in which they had lived for 17 years.

The family of four with two young sons moved out of their apartment after a renovation that increased the rent from $1,100 to $2,200 a month.

“It was heartbreaking and traumatic to be forced from our home and neighbourhood,” Sauve said, adding that the location had allowed her to ride her bike to work. “Transportation is a big part of liveability.”

Mary Clare Zak (left) is director of Social Policy with the City of Vancouver, and Abigail Bond is director of Housing Policy.NICK PROCAYLO /
PNG

Unable to afford another rental in their neighbourhood, the family moved to South Vancouver. Now they are considering moving to Langley, where they could afford to buy a townhouse and have the stability of knowing their family will never again be forced from their home.

With young families like these moving out, the question arises whether cities should strive to keep families with children as residents. If so, what can cities do to stop families from moving to more affordable suburbs like Surrey, where schools are full to bursting?

The consensus answer to the first question is a resounding yes. Experts agree that children are vital to the wellbeing of cities for economic, community and environmental reasons.

“It’s very important that we have a diverse population with different ages, different incomes,” said Abigail Bond, the City of Vancouver’s director of Housing Policy. “It’s very important that we have children because their parents are often the people driving the economy of the city and the region.”

Alexander Stahle, a researcher in urban design at the School of Architecture in Stockholm, where 50,000 kids live downtown, making up 18 per cent of the population, says cities with a lower percentage of kids are “dead and boring.”

“They are socially segregated, and with segregation comes alienation and distrust,” Stahle said. “Cities that are bad for children will not attract families that are a vital part of the creative workforce. Cities need talent — and those people are often parents.”

A survey conducted by the Vancouver Foundation in 2012 found Metro Vancouver residents feel increasingly estranged from their friends, their neighbours and their communities. More than half of respondents agreed that Vancouver is becoming a resort town for the wealthy, and many said they felt alone more often than they would like. They consider Vancouver a difficult place to make friends.

Those feelings of isolation may be linked to the low numbers of children in the city because children promote social networks, and the more social we are, the happier we are, said author Montgomery.

The answer to the question of how to keep families and children in cities has a lot to do with the affordability of housing and the availability of childcare, experts say.

One thing Vancouver is doing to try to retain families is to increase the number of two- and three-bedroom homes. A staff presentation to Vancouver city council says 8,000 families live in one-bedroom or studio apartments in the city, and 621 families with three or more people are on the B.C. Housing wait list.

Bond said a new family housing policy approved in July this year increases the number of two- and three-bedroom units required in any new development to 35 per cent in both rental and ownership housing. For social housing, half must be two- or three-bedroom suites.

The city is also developing 358 units of housing in four locations across the city, using city-owned land. Forty-three per cent of these homes will be for families and they will be offered at below-market rates, Bond said. Vancouver’s affordable housing agency is also working on developing the East Fraser Lands, where the target is that 70 per cent are for families, she said.

One thing Vancouver is doing to try to retain families is to increase the number of two- and three-bedroom homes.

Stahle said a kid-friendly city is walkable and that family-friendly housing should be close to ground level — buildings should be no more than seven storeys tall — and should have access to a garden or courtyard. Many of the children in downtown Stockholm live in a dense new district of five- to seven-storey buildings with green courtyards and playgrounds.

Child-friendly housing is key, agrees Montgomery, pointing out that people who look after children in towers tend to be isolated. Children who live in homes above walk-up level have poorer education and health outcomes, even when poverty is factored out.

During research for B.C. Housing on the topic of cities and sociability, Montgomery has found access to childcare to be the other key driver in keeping families in cities.

“Childcare expenses can be as big a burden on families as their mortgage,” Montgomery said. “So any effort to welcome and include families in cities has got to consider this burden.”

The city agrees that access to childcare is critical for keeping families, said Mary Clare Zak, the City of Vancouver’s managing director of social policy. There are opportunities to use excess space in schools for childcare, particularly in new schools that are being built as part of seismic upgrades. But the strategy could also work in older schools facing closure due to excess space, said Zak.

Having ample, affordable childcare fulfils many goals of a city, said Zak. It meets the economic goal because it is easier for parents to work, it meets the well-being goal because it reduces parents’ stress, and it meets an environmental goal because if families live in the city where they work, they are not driving to and from the suburbs and thus have a smaller carbon footprint.

Using school space to accomplish that goal could also save schools from closure, which would mean keeping them as public assets.

She also noted that families and schools serve as connective tissue for neighbourhoods.

“This is something that’s often overlooked — that connective tissue. The amount of activities that happen around and throughout a school really does build social capital,” Zak said. “That connective tissue is very, very important and we’d be leery of that becoming disconnected.”

Is there more to this story? We’d like to hear from you about this or any other stories you think we should know about. Email vantips@postmedia.com.

FACT BOX

Statistics Canada has maps of the Metro area based on the 2011 Census (new numbers are expected in February), reflecting the lowest number of children under age 14 are in the City of Vancouver (less than 13 per cent), slightly more in areas surrounding Vancouver such as Richmond, West Vancouver and Burnaby (between 13.4 per cent and 16.7 per cent) and the highest numbers in the further-flung suburbs like Delta, Surrey, Langley and Maple Ridge (higher than 16.7 per cent). Downtown Toronto has 15.3 per cent, with surrounding suburbs all closer to 20 per cent.

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